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Until they become conscious they will never rebel and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
In the week after the Edward Snowden revelations first broke, sales of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by six thousand percent.1 Key actors in the drama, including Glenn Greenwald and Snowden himself, rushed to describe the implications of the leaks as "Orwellian," while President Barack Obama quickly reassured the nation that "in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance."2 Contemporary mass surveillance practices are still often understood in Orwellian terms. But although Orwell's lasting salience is undeniable, his appropriateness for understanding surveillance practices in a digital age has been questioned.3 Nineteen Eighty-Four was written before personal computing, before the internet, before social media, and before big data. Doesn't every crystal ball have a shelf life, even the most prescient?
In the last decade, a proliferation of dystopian visions have warned us of the potentially disastrous consequences of our increasing dependence on digital technologies that are rapidly eroding our privacy. Dave Eggers's The Circle (2014) and Shummet Baluja's The Silicon Jungle (2011) both explore the consequences of social media and corporate surveillance.4 Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (2008) and Homeland (2013) attacked the mass surveillance practices of the post-9/11 US national security state years before Snowden brought them into the limelight of public scrutiny.5 The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a collection of short stories on digital surveillance with the explicit aim of inspiring resistance, and two other major collections of short stories by American authors in the last year have taken the internet's erosion of privacy as their central theme.6 Film and television has likewise witnessed a bonanza of digital dystopias in recent years, including Ex Machina (2014), the last two seasons of Black Mirror (2016), Person of Interest (2011–16), and many others. If Nineteen Eighty-Four now offers an anachronistic framework for understanding contemporary surveillance practices, doesn't it make sense for us to examine some of these more recent dystopias that have updated and made appropriate to the information age our...